i tried to burn a cd with k3b, but it gave me an error saying there was no device to burn it with. i looked at the settings it had, and it had my burner as a reader only, and not a write. whats wrong?

10-18-2004

melee

Writer recognition

Hi,
I have never used K3b, but would be amazed if it is anything more than a graphic shell for cdrecord.
From a terminal type "cdrecord -v -scanbus" to show SCSI devices on system
"cdrecord -v -scanbus dev=ATA" to show ATAPI under 2.6
or "cdrecord -v -scanbus dev=ATAPI" for ATAPI under 2.4
This will give you a list of all your CD-DVD ROMs Writers etc

Then select your writer from the list and using the numerical target spec against that entry call "cdrecord -v -prcap dev=x,x,x"
where x,x,x will be say 0,6,0 for a SCSI writer perhaps
"ATAPI:0,1,0" perhaps for an ATAPI drive found using dev=ATAPI
"ATA:0,1,0" perhaps for an ATAPI drive using dev=ATA
(If you get both an ATAPI and a ATA listing, try the ATA first)

That will get you the capabilities of your drive

If it tells you what you already know (its a writer) thats fine. If it doesn't you have system specific problems I cant help with.

A command "cdrecord -v dev=x,x,x -tao -dummy /some/filename.iso" will do a dummy burn to a CD disc on your writer.
If all else fails actually read the man pages for cdrecord!!
Depending on the version it may require to specify the mode "-tao" or similar, later versions assume it if nothing else given.

just a little suggestion, you culd try X-CD-Roast, that's what I'm using (it emerged faster than k3b, I'll be testing k3b later on). Though X-CD-Roast is a little different at first look it worked fine when I burned a few backup discs (I had compiled ISOs with the data).